A Top 3 regional health insurance provider sought to drive new efficiencies while improving customer experience—two objectives which often seem at odds with one another.
The COO of administrative operations for this regional health-insurance giant, which employs 3,000 people across four locations in three states, wanted to take a new approach to the challenge. Previously in her career, she had been a manufacturing engineer. Looking for quick and massive wins, she tasked her internal operations consulting team with productivity improvement. Their lean methodology succeeded—at small scale. This was far from the “massive” benefit which the COO desired.
She then reached out to The Lab, North America’s respected resource for end-to-end (E2E) process mapping, automation-opportunity discovery, and implementation of standardized knowledge-work activities and RPA or robotic process automation.
The COO saw how previous efforts had fallen short: Cutting costs would deliver short-term gains. Headcount would shrink, but administrative errors wouldn’t.
Customers flooded the phones with complaints. As noted above, most managers viewed healthcare payer operations cost-reduction and service-improvement as competing goals. Meanwhile, low-cost competitors were stealing customers.
End-to-end improvement of enterprise health insurance operations required first mapping the processes, a specialty of The Lab. The detailed process maps quickly let health-insurance leaders see bottlenecks, inefficiencies, and rework; they also call out opportunities for robotic process automation “bots” that can “sit at the computer” and take over the kinds of low-value chores that have employees heading for the exits.
The Lab’s marching orders were broad and deep. The project encompassed a wide swath of enterprise operations, including:
Each value stream warranted its own map. Surprisingly, the E2E mapping took only seven weeks, with minimal input required of the insurer’s sponsors, staff, and subject matter experts or SMEs. The Lab routinely performs end-to-end mapping of both business processes and customer journeys, remotely from our U.S. offices in Houston, with nothing outsourced or offshored, in just weeks.
Once the mapping was complete, the benefit opportunities quickly surfaced. The Lab identified more than 200 discrete improvements; some could harness the power of RPA, while others would require no technology whatsoever. Examples include:
For every sit-at-the computer chore which staffers detest performing, there’s a bot, configurable by The Lab, to handle it. Mundane, tedious, and error-prone activities, in which staffers function as “the human glue” between disparate systems that don’t talk to each other, are ideal opportunities for “parking an RPA bot.”
Bots from The Lab can typically be configured in just weeks. We use the best teams and developers, working remotely from our U.S. offices in Houston, with nothing ever outsourced or offshored.
RPA bots from The Lab not only speed up health insurance operations. They virtually eliminate errors. More importantly, they improve employee morale and talent retention, since key staffers are freed to focus on more valuable and fulfilling activities.
The Lab’s initial scoping, analysis, and mapping took just seven weeks. This leading health insurer then retained The Lab for implementation of our findings, which spanned six months.
The engagement was entirely self-funding, with a guaranteed business case. The overall results, in addition to the details noted above, were impressive:
The project broke even in just five months. The 12-month ROI was tenfold.
The best way to appreciate this speed and game-changing power is to see it for yourself. We invite you to schedule your free, no-obligation 30-minute screen-sharing demo with The Lab. You’ll see real RPA banking bots in action, and get all your questions answered by our friendly experts.
Simply contact The Lab today at (201) 526-1200 or email us at info@thelabconsulting.com to book your free screen-share bot demo.
